Sorry seems to be the easiest word, lately. Everyone's apologising. If you're reading this in the UK, surely you must have noticed. Last week, following the damning conclusions published by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, we witnessed the editor of The Sun newspaper in the UK, Dominic Mohan, rightly issue an apology on the newspaper's website as he expressed sorrow for the tabloid's inaccurate reporting of the 1989 disaster at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. The Prime Minister also later apologised on behalf of the nation.
This week we also saw the Sheffield MP and the UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said sorry for breaking his election pledge to oppose increases in university tuition fees. His broadcast was then satirised in the form of a song. You can even download the song as a charity single and listen to Clegg's autotuned apologies to your heart's content. Then we also discovered that on Wednesday, another MP, Andrew Mitchell, had allegedly sworn at a policeman and had called him a pleb. Typical of their journalistic restraint, The Sun – who first reported the story – even indicated the preceding profanity in print. The BBC and others were less explicit, though the damage had already been done.
As indicated in a previous blog post, we now live in an age where, thanks to the permanence of the Internet, every ephemeral faux pas and many grave errors can be replayed ad infinitum. As a result, the general public as well as the political and media elite are becoming more aware of how acts of contrition are received. And while they may not be familiar with Brown and Levinson's work in Linguistics on politeness (including an examination of the apology); I believe people are becoming increasingly able to tell the difference between a sincere apology and a PR stunt or a damage limitation exercise. In turn, this increased level of scrutiny concerning the genuine sincerity behind an apology now frequently leads to it being rejected – by either the wronged party or by others (the public at large) who, at least in the first instance, were not the intended recipient of the apology.
In my opinion, this is the case with Andrew Mitchell MP. In days gone by, he would have apologised sincerely to the policeman concerned and then to his boss (the PM) – both of which he has now done. That would've been the end of the matter. But these days, only a resignation or a sacking will suffice. Clearly every case has to be assessed on its own merits; though as we watch these sorry sagas from the sidelines, we are only satisfied when our preferred form of punishment is meted out.
Saturday 22 September 2012
Saturday 15 September 2012
Lessons in life
Sometimes events change us and shift our focus onto issues and people that may not feature prominently in our thoughts in any normal week. But this last week has been anything but normal. On Monday I was asked to buy ingredients and then oversee (with four students) the preparation and cooking of enough fish pies and vegetable pies to feed our small school on Thursday. I'd never cooked for 20+ people before, so today's blog entry was due to be called 'Hey, bring me more fish!', and would record the benefits of task-based language learning as we put our culinary skills to the test – completely through the medium of English.
So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.
And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.
The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.
So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.
And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.
The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.
Saturday 8 September 2012
Happy death-day tu vous?
Today I must report the imminent collapse of polite society as we know it.
That's what certain French social media refuseniks
would have you believe, anyway. For it seems that the enfant terrible of
the Internet – Twitter – and its users, have adopted the convention of
referring to others online using the informal second-person pronoun tu
rather than its more formal and polite equivalent, vous.
To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:
"Can I say you to you?"
How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.
The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?
Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.
We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.
To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:
"Can I say you to you?"
How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.
The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?
Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.
We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.
Saturday 1 September 2012
So enchanted by how clever we are
I've just finished Guy Deutscher's brilliant book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages. The book was meticulously researched and well argued, and it fired my imagination in so many ways. Deutscher examined whether language affects thought. On this evidence, the answer is complex. He looked at the relationship between language, colour and culture; words used to describe spatial relationships (right, left, behind, in front of vs. the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west in other languages and cultures); gendered languages and how generalising the perceptions of a given mother tongue as universals for all languages has been a major flaw in enthusiastic yet erroneous research in the past. Hence this book charts the haphazard progression of research per se, which in turn reminded me of these song lyrics:
We light the deepest ocean
Send photographs of Mars
We're so enchanted by how clever we are
Julian Lennon – 'Saltwater' (1991)
Our knowledge of language and science barely scratches the surface of what lies undiscovered and what remains for us to get wrong. Occasionally even Deutscher's own examples to illustrate his points seemed questionable. Recalling his daughter's ability to recognise that the sky is blue, at the ripe old age of four, she declared that the black night sky was 'blue' (Deutscher, 2011:72). The lack of even a name for the colour blue in some languages led the author to ask his daughter to describe the appearance of an object/concept (the sky) that is not always the same colour. In my view, we see the sky as 'blue' because most of the time, we want it to be so. Grey skies, white snowy skies, red or orange sunsets or black nights cannot compete with a bright blue sky on a sunny day. Yet towards the end of the book we find this (ibid:249):
"It has been shown, for example, that long-term memory and object recognition play an important role in the perception of colour."
So depending on one's individual experiences, is it possible that a child's inability to correctly identify the colour of an object or concept merely demonstrates their underdeveloped long-term memory? Is it conceivable that by the age of four, the images and descriptions of the different skies I mentioned above have not yet been committed to memory for future recall at specific times or during certain seasons? If so, the relative rarity of a blue sky might account for a child's alternative description, drawing on a different memory of the sky.
My second query concerns Deutscher's investigation into the extent to which different languages' descriptions of an event provoke different perceptions of that event (ibid:140). Taking the example of 'It rains', he tells us how the action of falling and the object (droplets) are wrapped up in one verbal concept. In his mother tongue (Hebrew), these two concepts are kept apart. Despite different renderings in different languages, one's perception of the actual event is unchanged. And to confirm his central thesis that languages only differ in what they habitually compel their speakers to say, 'It rains', to my English eyes and ears, requires additional information in a way that other languages do not. This is because the grammar of English, unlike many other languages, compels speakers to use one of two ways to express an action in the present tense:
1.It rains.
(Simple present, used to describe a habitual action in the present)
e.g. It rains somewhere and at some time – and we need to know – every day.)
2. It is raining.
(Present continuous form, used to describe the action occurring at the time the statement is made)
e.g. At the time of writing, droplets are falling from the sky. If no further information concerning the location of the action is provided, we logically assume that it is occurring in the immediate vicinity of the person making the statement.)
'It rains.' on its own withholds the identity or location of the unfortunate souls subjected to a daily soaking! Deutscher keeps grammar and perception separate. Our understanding of the actual precipitation itself is not altered in either example, though I would argue that the events and our perception of them are significantly different, coloured by differing degrees of immediacy – and the resultant temporal or geographical data required in English.
So after all that, I would highly recommend this book. It will leave you asking questions and will change the way you think about languages in general, the empirical veracity of research, as well as the capacity of your own language to adequately reflect thought.
Source: Deutscher, Guy, (2011) 'Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages', Arrow, ISBN: 978-0-09-950557-0
We light the deepest ocean
Send photographs of Mars
We're so enchanted by how clever we are
Julian Lennon – 'Saltwater' (1991)
Our knowledge of language and science barely scratches the surface of what lies undiscovered and what remains for us to get wrong. Occasionally even Deutscher's own examples to illustrate his points seemed questionable. Recalling his daughter's ability to recognise that the sky is blue, at the ripe old age of four, she declared that the black night sky was 'blue' (Deutscher, 2011:72). The lack of even a name for the colour blue in some languages led the author to ask his daughter to describe the appearance of an object/concept (the sky) that is not always the same colour. In my view, we see the sky as 'blue' because most of the time, we want it to be so. Grey skies, white snowy skies, red or orange sunsets or black nights cannot compete with a bright blue sky on a sunny day. Yet towards the end of the book we find this (ibid:249):
"It has been shown, for example, that long-term memory and object recognition play an important role in the perception of colour."
So depending on one's individual experiences, is it possible that a child's inability to correctly identify the colour of an object or concept merely demonstrates their underdeveloped long-term memory? Is it conceivable that by the age of four, the images and descriptions of the different skies I mentioned above have not yet been committed to memory for future recall at specific times or during certain seasons? If so, the relative rarity of a blue sky might account for a child's alternative description, drawing on a different memory of the sky.
My second query concerns Deutscher's investigation into the extent to which different languages' descriptions of an event provoke different perceptions of that event (ibid:140). Taking the example of 'It rains', he tells us how the action of falling and the object (droplets) are wrapped up in one verbal concept. In his mother tongue (Hebrew), these two concepts are kept apart. Despite different renderings in different languages, one's perception of the actual event is unchanged. And to confirm his central thesis that languages only differ in what they habitually compel their speakers to say, 'It rains', to my English eyes and ears, requires additional information in a way that other languages do not. This is because the grammar of English, unlike many other languages, compels speakers to use one of two ways to express an action in the present tense:
1.It rains.
(Simple present, used to describe a habitual action in the present)
e.g. It rains somewhere and at some time – and we need to know – every day.)
2. It is raining.
(Present continuous form, used to describe the action occurring at the time the statement is made)
e.g. At the time of writing, droplets are falling from the sky. If no further information concerning the location of the action is provided, we logically assume that it is occurring in the immediate vicinity of the person making the statement.)
'It rains.' on its own withholds the identity or location of the unfortunate souls subjected to a daily soaking! Deutscher keeps grammar and perception separate. Our understanding of the actual precipitation itself is not altered in either example, though I would argue that the events and our perception of them are significantly different, coloured by differing degrees of immediacy – and the resultant temporal or geographical data required in English.
So after all that, I would highly recommend this book. It will leave you asking questions and will change the way you think about languages in general, the empirical veracity of research, as well as the capacity of your own language to adequately reflect thought.
Source: Deutscher, Guy, (2011) 'Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages', Arrow, ISBN: 978-0-09-950557-0
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